Sam Peckinpah’s TV play, Noon Wine, based on the short novel by Katherine Anne Porter, occupies a legendary position in his oeuvre, because it turned his career around when he was at a low ebb, making everything afterwards possible (although it’s THE WILD BUNCH which created his unstoppable momentum in the next decade), and also because it’s been almost impossible to see.

After being shut out of the editing room on the troubled MAJOR DUNDEE (Charlton Heston wondered why Orson Welles and Sam Peckinpah, so charming to their actors when they wanted to be, could not turn that charm on the moneymen; Peckinpah wrote to his producer, “You are a well-poisoner, Jerry, and I damn you for it”), and after being fired from THE CINCINATTI KID after allegations that he tried to shoot hardcore pornography on the MGM lot (screenwriter Terry Southern claimed, plausibly, that it was his idea of adding an interracial love scene that freaked out the suits; but see also Susan George’s allegations about Peckinpah’s initial plans for the rape scene in STRAW DOGS, which tends to support suspicions about the director’s enthusiasm for what might be termed “sexual realism”) — anyhow, after all that, nobody was willing to touch Peckinpah.

This low-budget TV play demonstrated that Peckinpah could be trusted to turn up, shoot to schedule, and get great reviews. What’s weird is how shonky Noon Wine is. Admittedly, the source material screened at Edinburgh International Film Festival, supplied by UCLA, may not have shown the film at it’s best — though this may be the best surviving material. It looks to have been shot on tape, filmed off a TV screen, and then dumped back onto digital, but it’s hard to be sure. The colour is streaky, the image sometimes displaying a tubular edge distortion, and the resolution is low, and there’s also the unpleasantly smooth, HOBBIT-like video movement, though one soon gets used to that.

The piece is obviously cheap as chips, with laughable production design in the courtroom scene — blank stage flats painted in streaks to try to add a spurious sense of detail. But much low-budget TV still impresses, due to story and acting and framing. Noon Wine is erratic in all of these aspects.

Technically, the piece is below the standard of most TV of the period, with music unconvincingly papering over gaps in the soundtrack where Peckinpah seems to have shot mute. The only visual sequences which don’t look flatly televisual are the frequent montages, layerings of lap dissolves to show time passing. Generally, whenever Peckinpah mucks about with lap dissolves, wipes, freeze frames, ripple dissolves or accelerated motion, I cringe. These examples aren’t outright offensive, but they get a little embarrassing sometimes.

Olivia DeHavilland is good, naturally. Jason Robards SHOUTS all the time, just like Steve Martin in THE JERK. Per Oscarsson is outstanding. Whenever I see him, I always think, Who is this strange man, where did he come from and what’s he doing here? I even saw him in a Swedish film, DR GLAS, and thought the same thing. So he’s perfect to play what the script calls “a stranger in a strange land.” Theodore Bikel essays a range of characterful tics including a Magoo chortle, and seems to have strayed in from another, more amusing but far worse film.

The story seems predicated upon an ambiguous event (an unseen axe murder) like the Marabar Caves in A Passage to India, but Peckinpah struggles to make the unclear clear. His use of monologues, internal monologues, expository dialogue and more montages is frequently awkward. I realized that Peckinpah’s movies are almost never solo writing jobs, though his work on The Rifleman and The Westerner on TV showed he could get the job done OK when he had to. But he never had to solve all the narrative problems of a feature script without help.

It feels almost ungrateful to get a rare chance to see something like this projected, and not like it better. But that leaves the enduring mystery of how Peckinpah’s career got rebooted by a tiny TV play that isn’t very good. The most interesting thing about it, to me, was that the film, so little seen but so significant in its repercussions for Peckinpah, is like the offscreen murder itself — it is responsible for everything that happens afterwards, but in itself it is unknowable, unseeable and impossible to understand.

I was just thinking, “Now all we need is Nick Ray’s The High Green Wall” — and then I thought to check YouTube and here it is! Hope it’s good.

So, a sometime correspondent self-combusts, and we must ask “Why?” Some of the speculation surrounding the death of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre has viewed him as a delightful eccentric, which is a little odd since his chosen exit seems to have been calculated to assassinate his neighbours, and since in 2001 he was charged with a horrifying, yet deeply bizarre, assault on a neighbour, strapping her to a chair, shaving her head, and spray-painting her black from head to toe.

As if this weren’t weird enough, it chimes oddly with FGM’s sole novel, The Woman Between the Worlds, where the hero, a tattooist, is approached by an invisible woman demanding he tattoo her all over to render her visible. It’s all… very strange.

Here’s the second email I received from the late “Froggy” MacIntyre. Alas, I don’t seem to have preserved any more, and I think there were others. Author’s interjections/annonations in grey.

Ahoy, Dave:

In case any of you didn’t know, calling a David “Dave” without being invited to do so is bad form.

Eily Malyon was distinctly Victorian in appearance. Very small and thin, with very sharp hatchet-faced features. A wide range of English and Scottish accents, less successful with Yank accents. In terms of character type, much like Margaret Hamilton but far more distinctive in appearance. Her best roles were as the scheming aunt in ‘On Borrowed Time’ and the wife of butler John Carradine (and sister of the escaped convict) in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’.

She was perfectly cast as the Victorian orphanage-mistress in ‘Jane Eyre’. She bullied Shirley Temple in ‘A Little Princess’. She briefly appeared (with no lines) as the nurse in ‘Dracula’s Daughter’. She was the priests’ housekeeper in ‘Going My Way’. She was the prim librarian (chastising Teresa Wright for coming to the library at closing time) in ‘Shadow of a Doubt’. She was the owner of the laundry, tormenting Maureen O’Sullivan in ‘Devil Doll’. She was the dairymaid who shared a touching moment with Garbo in ‘Camille’, the nun who aided Fredric March in ‘Les Miserables’. She had a very brief appearance (head and voice only, body never seen) in ‘Confessions of a Nazi Spy’, instantly memorable as a Scotswoman loyal to the Reich. She was an hotelier, sceptical of Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray in ‘Beyond Suspicion’. She played weeping bullied wives in ‘The Wet Parade’ and ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. She was the minister’s dutiful wife in ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’. She appeared in the opening scene of ‘I Married a Witch’, circa 1690, wearing Pilgrim garb as a woman named Tabitha … who looked very hag-like indeed, yet who was NOT the witch in this movie. If memory serves, I believe Eily Malyon was in ‘She-Wolf of London’, sharing scenes with Sara Haden: not a good idea, this, as she and Haden were similar in type and physical appearance.

We were talking about our favourite character actresses and I wasn’t sure, at the time, who Malyon was.

In REAL life, Sara Allgood was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the cult that featured so prominently in my novel ‘The Woman Between the Worlds’. She was a member of the London chapter, alongside Yeats, Machen, Crowley and Florence Farr. Noted for her fine speaking voice, it often fell to Allgood to read out the texts during their rituals. Allgood worked with Hitchcock but she had a very low opinion of him as a director. Begorrah!

Una O’Connor. Oh, dear. I despise that shriek of hers. Still, I would like to have seen the Broadway production of J B Priestley’s play ‘The Linden Tree’, in which O’Connor played the housekeeper of an elderly professor. The professor was played by Boris Karloff. When Priestley learnt that Karloff had been cast, he objected on the grounds that audiences would think it was a play about an axe-murderer. After reading Karloff’s favourable notices, Priestley apologised.

I quoted Richard Lester’s statement that Ralph Richardson said he always started off with the walk, a baffling assertion, since all RR’s characters walk the same way. I still believe Lester was telling the truth, and Ralph was probably indulging a flight of whimsy.

Ralph Richardson ‘always started with the walk’? Erm, I think you’re thinking of Alec Guinness.

Which reminds me: it’s been a while since I’ve seen ‘Heavenly Creatures’ but I guess you’re correct that I’ve got the two girls swapped.

This was in regard to the question of which actress played the woman who grew up to be crime writer Anne Perry. FGM said he’d often used the argument that “write what you know” is a fallacy, since murder mysteries are not written by murderers, and he resented Perry for blowing a hole in this argument.

I like to pretend that any given director’s film oeuvre all takes place in the same universe. This explains why, during the murder scene in Peter Jackson’s ‘Heavenly Creatures’, you can see Gollum lurking in the shrubbery.

I mentioned Olivia DeHavilland’s claim that she had a special scent made to symbolize each character she played. Wearing the perfume would instantly get her “into character.” I presumed she wore two different scents to play twins in THE DARK MIRROR.

The DeHavilland story about her scents is a new one to me. I admire her for her bravery in bucking the studio system’s repressive contract suspensions. A lot of big-name actors (including Bogart) gave lip service to her cause, but didn’t have the guts to stand with her.

I still don’t know how they did the twin sequences in ‘The Dark Mirror’. The usual lurk for a double exposure is to mask one side of the frame whilst filming the other, then switch. Apparently DeHavilland filmed all of her twin scenes in one take, with another actress on-camera playing the second twin, facing the camera … and then, afterwards, DeHavilland’s head (facing the camera) was superimposed over this woman’s head in the print lab. I don’t understand how this was done. Unless the other woman was a microcephalic, surely her own head would stick out in places where DeHavilland’s head was narrower.

I suggested that this story originated from DeHavilland, who had not fully understood the technical processes involved. From her point of view, she had acted both roles against another actress, and then somehow replaced her, but the exact mechanism escaped her grasp.

I’m surprised, looking back, that all this didn’t lead FGM to repeat his claim of having a twin brother, for which there is no evidence…

‘The Corsican Brothers’, starring Douglas Fairbanks Jnr as twins, features one astonishing fight scene in which the brothers circle each other in the same shot, with no discernible cut nor masking. When I saw this, circa 1974, I resolved that if I ever met Fairbanks I would ask him how it was done. I *did* meet him years later, but quite forgot to ask this question.

I’m now determined to check this out.

In ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’, Mary Pickford played the title role (a small boy) AND his mother, both onscreen at the same go. For decades, I kept hearing that the double-exposure sequences in this film were so incredibly sophisticated that to this day nobody knows how they were done … most notably a scene in which the boy jumps into his mother’s arms. When I finally saw this movie, I found the special effects very crude by modern standards. I quite accept that they were advanced for the time. In the arm-jumping scene, the boy is clearly a double with his back to the camera.

Did DeHavilland have any input into the creation of her scents, or did she just trust someone to create a scent appropriate to the character?

My favourite detail in the novel ‘Camille’ never got into the movie: the prostitute wore a white camellia corsage every day … except three days each month, when she wore a red camellia. I can’t imagine what this symbolises. (Not half!)

The musical ‘Annie’ (by John Huston, of all people) and the Rodgers&Hart bio ‘Words and Music’ both contain the same bizarre anachronism: both feature a scene in which the main characters go to a cinema and watch ‘Camille’. In both cases, this scene takes place BEFORE ‘Camille’ was filmed! In the case of ‘Words and Music’, ‘Camille’ is actually re-edited as a SILENT film so that Richard Rodgers can see it in the 1920s. Feel free to run this past your friend Wingrove Melville, or whatever alias he’s using.

I forgot to do so.

I knew about Patrick MacNee’s lezzy mum and her ‘wife’: they dressed him in a kilt and kept his hair long, and told him he’d make an excellent girl, but they didn’t quite go so far as putting him into girls’ clothes. I hadn’t known about Peter Cushing being given that treatment, nor Wyler. Ernest Hemingway and his older sister had a mother who delighted in treating them as same-sex twins: sometimes dressing both as girls, sometimes as boys. (Joan Crawford adopted two unrelated girls, and insisted on raising them as twins.) Another boy raised as a girl was Charles Beaumont, author of ‘Twilight Zone’ scripts. In fact, this wasn’t his real name; I suspect he took this name from Charles Beaumont, Chevalier d’Eon, real-life cross-dresser and namesake of Britain’s Beaumont Society.

The oddest such case known to me is that of the father of Walter D Edmonds, a best-selling Yank novelist of the 1930s, several of whose novels were filmed. Edmonds’s paternal grandmother decided to enrol her son (Edmonds’s father) in the school she had attended. Unfortunately, it was an all-girl school. She was afraid her son would be conspicuous as the only boy in an all-girl school, so her ‘solution’ was to send him to school dressed like all the other students: in the schoolgirl uniform! Apparently he didn’t mind this but he *did* mind the ordeal of walking to and from school, jeered by the local boys (one of whom broke his nose with a stone).

The reason why the above cases lodge in my memory is because I too spent part of my boyhood as a girl. I was one of the ‘child migrants’ who were forcibly expatriated from postwar Britain to Australia; in my case, I was sent to a ‘work farm’ in Queensland, and used as slave labour by Anglican priests and their matrons. When I was 11 years old I escaped, and the local authorities went to considerable trouble to find me. I was fortunate to receive some protection from an expat Scotswoman: a former gynaecological nurse who — shades of the recent ‘Vera Drake — had been struck off the register for doing abortions. (Illegal at the time, circa 1959.) She had performed an abortion on a teenage girl who had died on the table, and had been quietly disposed of, with no death certificate issued. The authorities were looking for me, so the ex-nurse hid me in plain sight by disguising me as a girl and equipping me with the dead girl’s identity for a few weeks until the search went cold … she also had me make a few public appearances as the dead girl, so that this girl’s disappearance could not be traced to her visit to the nurse’s address. After a few weeks, and a relocation of several hundred miles, it was safe for me to reclaim my male identity. A good job it was, too, as I was not very passable as a girl. I know for a fact that at least one person rumbled me. In all, I likely spent far less time in skirts than Hemingway did.

All of which brings me full circle to Eily Malyon. I shan’t divulge the name of the nurse who saved me, but physically and vocally she was a dead ringer for Eily Malyon. (I think they may have been related.) To this day, whenever I see Malyon onscreen, I have to fight off a momentary belief that I’m seeing the woman whom I knew. But I am indeed genuinely impressed with Eily Malyon as an actress, and I believe that I would still hold her talents in high regard without this coincidence.

Up until WW1, it was fairly common to raise boys in skirts, but this was for practical reasons: it made them less likely to climb trees and get up to other dangerous stunts, and it made it easier to change their nappies. The first stage on the path to manhood was the ritual of the ‘breeching’, in which a boy was deemed sufficiently mature to give up his skirts in favour of trousers… usually short ones.

I’ve encountered a couple of remote seacoast villages in the Hebrides and Orkneys in which the boys were raised in skirts, allegedly so that the sea (being animist and sentient) would mistake them for girls (less valued) and not carry them off on a wave.

I mentioned the young William Wyler’s stunt of driving his motorcycle off a diving board at parties.

Wyler rode his OWN motorcycle into swimming pools? I should think this would cost him considerable money. When Wyler directed the Ben-Hur remake, the studio publicity made much of the fact that he had been assistant director on the original. Wyler modestly pointed out that his duties as ‘assistant director’ were largely a matter of crowd control. From what little I know of him, he was a genuinely modest man in an industry run by egomaniacs.

I’m gobsmacked by what you tell me about Wyler’s daughter being abducted by a paedo, and more gobsmacked that she wasn’t harmed. Did the bastard have a pang of conscience and let her go, or was she rescued before he could do anything? This reminds me of how Forrest Ackerman’s wife Wendayne (translator of ‘Perry Rhodan’) was assaulted by two Italian thugs on a Vespa. Those damned things are illegal but the Eyeties don’t care.

A touch of racism here. MacIntyre was a rabid right-winger. In fact, I believe Wyler’s poor daughter was harmed, in the sense of being molested, but not otherwise physically injured. In a fashion which seems almost impossible to credit now, everybody simply got on with their lives and didn’t make a big fuss about it. Glad to have her back alive.

The movie ‘Hammett’ (filmed in London) features a scene in which he stops at a newsagent’s kiosk in San Francisco which carries an advert for the News of the World.

One of Hammett’s novels (I forget which) mentions a case about a man named Flitcraft. I believe that this was an actual case that Hammett worked on for Pinkerton, although the name Flitcraft was probably made up. Flitcraft was a respectable family man, went to his job every day, went home every night. No scandal. One day he left for work and simply never showed up. No corpse found, no ransom note. Detectives encounter such cases; usually the guy had a double life for a long time, involving a mistress, and spent months or years crafting a second identity for himself before scarpering. But the Flitcraft case showed no such pattern. Eventually, Flitcraft was located hundreds of miles away, living a very undistinguished life under a new name. Here’s what happened. One his way to work, he passed a building site. A steel beam fell off the site and struck the pavement quite near where he was standing. A sherd of concrete struck his face, shocking him more than actually injuring him. But for the vagary of a few inches, he would have been killed instantly. The emotional shock of this ‘death’ was so powerful that, purely on the spur of the moment, Flitcraft effectively ‘died’ and started over as somebody else, with no prior preparation. I find this very spooky.

The Flitcraft case is alluded to in The Maltese Falcon.

A similar case (which I’ve mentioned on IMDb) is that of 1930s comedian Paul McCullough, who was in a horrible auto accident: he emerged unscathed, but became firmly convinced he had died. A few days later, he was in a car that stopped outside a barbershop in which the barber was stropping one of those Sweeney Todd razors. McCullough rushed in, grabbed the razor and slit his own throat. Shockingly, he took a considerable time to die of this.

Cornell Woolrich. For some reason, I keep thinking he wrote ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’. It was Dahl, of course. I think Woolrich wrote the one about the kidnapped boy who is hidden in plain sight at a fairgrounds. The kidnapper drugs him, sews him into a chimpanzee skin, and leaves him asleep in a monkey cage.

I’ve only ever seen the Victorian cylinder case in one article (not story) by ES Gardner. He may have made it up, but it doesn’t sound like his yarns.

This is Erle Stanley Gardner, but I have quite forgotten what the Victorian cylinder case WAS.

I’ve heard of William Roughead but never read him.

I referenced Groucho’s line, a reported outtake from his game show You Bet Your Life, in response to a man with many kids who claimed to love his wife: “I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally.”

That Groucho line is an urban legend. It never happened. Groucho DID sometimes unloose a wisecrack with such alacrity and acerbity that even he was shocked, but this one didn’t happen. Of similar provenance are two others that (never) occurred on the Stateside chat-show compered by Johnny Carson. Allegedly, an actress strode onto his set, carrying a moggie. She then sat down with the moggie in her lap and asked Carson: ‘Would you like to pet my pussy?’ to which he ostensibly replied: ‘Move the cat and I will’. No way an actress would voluntarily appear on a live show with an animal that might upstage her, and no way Carson would have approved it if she had. The other dodgy one: allegedly Carson interviewed the wife of a pro golfer, and asked if her husband had any good-luck rituals. She replied that, before a big match, she kissed her husband’s balls … prompting Carson to rejoin: ‘I bet that makes his putter stand up.’ Why would Carson interview the wife of a celebrity, rather than the celebrity himself?

I can think of several explanations: maybe the woman was famous in her own right? Maybe the incident took place in private life, not on TV? Either way, neither story is very funny.

The ‘League of [Extraordinary] Gentlemen’ comic books featured a young woman as the leader of the 19th-century League: very 21st-century PC, you know. (I well and truly dislike period pieces in which the characters have a modern-day ethos.) The film version of ‘League of Gentlemen’ made Connery the boss. This was intended as a ‘lad’ flick, and the lads don’t want to see a movie where a lassie gives the orders.

Straight on till mourning,

Froggy MacIntyre

The part of my discussion with MacIntyre which isn’t preserved, but which I remember, is his expressed resentment at the actress Margaret Sullivan’s suicide. She became depressed after losing her hearing, and MacIntrye claimed that his former wife had coped so bravely with her own deafness, that he was made angry thinking of Sullivan yielding to despair. All tragically ironic since “Froggy” apparently took his own life.

Startlingly, FGM has a letter published in this month’s Fortean Times: as was his wont, he uses the opportunity of a FT article to drop in some piece of obscure lore, and then link this to a plug for one of bis publications. A boost from beyond.

Shadowplay guest bloggerand part-time benshi film describer David Wingrove, who writes as David Melville, reports on Kenneth Anger’s appearance — or should one say MANIFESTATION? — at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Read it up!

On a grey and rainy August afternoon (in Scotland, that is not a contradiction) two friends and I took a train to Dundee to meet Kenneth Anger. He is a…well, I could say ‘living legend’ but that hardly seems to do him justice.

David Wingrove on his way back from Dundee, photographed by Fiona, who had just managed to get her camera to work.

For 60 years or so, Anger has been the uncrowned king of gay/experimental/avant-garde/underground cinema. (Just watch Fireworks (1947) or Scorpio Rising (1963) and slot in whatever adjectives fit best.) He is the notorious author of Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II, still the most scabrous books of movie gossip. His long-promised Hollywood Babylon III lies buried under a heap of threatened lawsuits. An alleged Satanist and avowed disciple of Aleister Crowley, he was unwillingly linked (through his ex-boyfriend Bobby Beausoleil) to the grisly Charles Manson killings.

At four years of age, Anger played the Changeling Prince in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, still Hollywood’s most purely intoxicating blend of Art and Kitsch. He is one of several distinguished survivors from that film – others include Mickey Rooney and Olivia de Havilland – and Warner Brothers’ failure to recruit one (if not all three) of them to do a commentary on last year’s DVD must count as a Crime Against Celluloid Memory. More than 70 years on, Rooney and Anger remain pals. Olivia may still be fuming at that snapshot of her in black lace lingerie (!) that Anger slipped into Hollywood Babylon II.

Either Dundee Contemporary Arts, or David Cairns Associates.

No wonder we felt a tad nervous, trudging through a downpour towards Dundee Contemporary Arts. (If the Great Beast didn’t come and get us, the wrath of Miss Melanie very well might.) So it’s a pleasure to say that, in person, Kenneth Anger is a joy. Gentle, soft-spoken, immaculately tanned, he looks a good two decades younger than his 78 years. In the bar after the show, he shared his enduring love of Shakespeare, commedia dell’arte and Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis. “Not long ago, I went to Paris for a showing. My God, have you seen the state of the print? It was so horrible I hid my eyes and ran out of the theatre.”

Kenneth Anger, in Dundee.

Judging from that night in Dundee, Anger’s own work has been strikingly well preserved. Lucifer Rising (1981) gave us Marianne Faithfull as Lilith, Mother of All the Demons – looking eerily beautiful with her face painted blue. Invocation of My Demon Brother (1968) had a soundtrack by Lilith’s old flame, Mick Jagger. Cheekily, Anger cuts in a few near-subliminal shots of the Rolling Stones and their court, in between the all-male orgies and the Black Mass. Rabbit’s Moon (1950), with its lovelorn Pierrot lost in a moonlit wood, is an achingly gorgeous evocation of both Shakespeare and Carné. It has the wistful and fragile beauty of a Verlaine poem.

Mouse Heaven (1992) is Anger’s celebration of the original Mickey Mouse drawn by Ub Iwerks – a subversive, anarchic little imp – before Walt Disney turned him into an icon of all-American cuteness. One of the most purely joyous pieces of cinema I have seen, Mouse Heaven sparked a ferocious copyright row with Disney. The wounds, for Anger, are still raw. He confided his long-cherished ambition to blow up Disneyland. “If it really is ‘the happiest place on earth’ as the ads say, why do so many children come out looking disappointed? Just look at their faces! Kids know when they’ve been cheated.”

Anger’s more recent films, shot on digital video, bear witness to his enduring love of the male form. My Surfing Lucifer (2007) shows a gold-haired beach boy riding the sort of waves that, in Southern California parlance, are called ‘tubular’. Foreplay (2007) spies on a soccer-team as they stretch and limber up before a game. The sight is numbingly normal to the players themselves, yet richly homoerotic to Anger and his camera. Once the official programme was through, Anger invited the whole audience up to the gallery for a ‘private’ showing of I’ll Be Watching You (2007) – a piece of hardcore gay erotica. Two cute French boys make love atop a parked car, while a third cute boy watches on CCTV and…er, enjoys it too. This may be the sexiest film ever made by a man old enough to be your granddad.

But the highlight of the late work was the not-yet-officially-premiered Ich Will (2008). A chilling yet weirdly erotic montage of documentary footage of the Hitler Youth. (The title translates from German as “I want!”) Starting with idyllic Sound ofMusic-style gambolling amid the lakes and mountains of Bavaria, it builds up to a full-scale Nazi rally that evokes the nightmare world of Leni Riefenstahl and Triumph of the Will. Its menace is underlined, brilliantly, by the ominous tones of Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony.

Invocation of my Demon Brother?

It’s not often one can go from Disney to Riefenstahl – from the Magic Kingdom to the Third Reich – with barely a hiccup in between. That is perhaps Anger’s unique gift. It was only on the dark, wet train ride back to Edinburgh that I got to pondering how similar these three artists really are. Walt Disney, Leni Riefenstahl, Kenneth Anger. All three create images that bypass our conscious mind and enter, direct and perhaps unbidden, into the depths of the id. We are aware, with other filmmakers, of a voice and a vision beyond our own. Disney, Riefenstahl, Anger…they speak from within.

The official premiere of Ich Will is set for the Imperial War Museum in London on 29 October. (All Souls Night, as Anger points out gleefully.) One shudders to think what the invited audience of elderly war veterans will make of it. Still, as Anger freely admits: “I’ve always enjoyed being a bit controversial.” That may or may not go down as the greatest understatement of the 21st century. But it will do very nicely for the first decade.

David Melville

Thanks to the Amazing Dr. Anger, to Yvonne Baginsky and Fiona Watson – who shared the experience – and to the fabulous staff at Dundee Contemporary Arts.